Pillar of the Sky

by Cecelia Holland

  Moloquin pushed him away. Something stirred in him, some old memory, like a pull on him. He took a hesitant step forward, and Grub seized him again.

  “Let’s go back. I want to go back—”

  “Ah, you always want to go back. Go by yourself.” Moloquin pushed him away and ran off across the meadow, the grass bending and breaking away from him.

  Straight ahead of him, a little stream ran along the edge of the meadow, turned below the foot of the hill and ran on, and he knew if he went around the turn, that he would find another meadow like this, beside the stream, and there, a sort of house—something—

  But when he went around the hill the stream ran left, not right, and there was no meadow. He stopped again, hardly noticing Grub who panted up behind him, crying to go home. Moloquin moved away from him a little, looking around him.

  Along this stream—somewhere—

  His memory showed him flashes of it, like a salmon leaping. His old mother. She had peeled away the bark of the trees, she had lived here, somewhere.

  But not here. Grub was pulling on him again. She was not here. When he realized that, it was with surprise he had ever thought she was. Grub was tugging on him, frantic. He looked around him again, longingly, at the trees, the stream that turned the wrong way, and saw again in his memory a broad sunny bench beside a stream near such a place as the dead grove, and a little house.

  Not here. A nameless longing filled him, a numb hollow sense of loss. Grub’s hand urged him away. He turned and let the little boy lead him back toward the living People.

  In the deep of the winter, old Brant went up the long slope to the Pillar of the Sky. He was supposed to take his novices and apprentice masters, but none of them showed him any sign of interest in the holy place, and so he went alone.

  He could see the place from far off, by the circling cloud of crows above it. His legs were tired; he stopped once or twice to rest, and each time his gaze went to the whirling black mass of the birds in the air.

  They were alarmed. They wanted to settle down into the dead ground—there was flesh there, he knew of two deaths in the village since the end of summer—and yet whenever they descended, something below scared them and they whirled up again, the air noisy with their wings and cries. So there was someone there, or something.

  He drove himself on. His duties today were necessary and important. And he had no enemies: he was afraid of nothing but the righteously angered spirits of his ancestors. It was curiosity that pushed him faster.

  As he reached the bank, a cold rain began to fail, and he stopped and put down the bundle he carried, opened it up, and took out his long coat of deerskin. Now the crows were filling the sky with their din, the black blades of their wings, annoyed with him too. Safe inside his coat, he went through the bank.

  It was Moloquin who kept the crows in the sky. Brant smiled to himself; he had suspected that.

  Moloquin sat there by the North Watcher, his arms draped over his raised knees. He seemed unsurprised at Brant’s appearance, and the old man went a few steps toward him, stopped, and turned, to give the place a long searching look.

  The grass was dead and brown. At the far end of the sacred precinct, in between two of the tilting stones, lay the dead. The little boy, who had been his mother’s delight, was covered over with cut boughs of a fir tree, and probably the old woman’s body had been covered too, once, but the crows had been at it and the flesh was exposed and bloody and ragged. The great circle enclosed them all, dead and living, in its ring of power; even the rain, coming sharper and colder now, was a blessing here. Brant turned toward Moloquin again.

  The boy rose up and came toward him. “Karelia said you would be here,” he said. “I will go if you wish.”

  Brant shook his head, smiling. “The rite is happier for the presence of the People.” He laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder and was surprised at the hard muscle he felt under Moloquin’s thin woven coat. “Would you like to help me?”

  At that Moloquin’s face shone; he said nothing, but moved closer to Brant, and the old man again put out his hand and touched him. They went together around the place, walking in a circle around the outside of the standing stones.

  As he walked, Brant let go a little of his knowledge, like the bird in the tale who dropped seeds from his beak to lead the People to safety. He said, “It is the circles that are great in all the places of standing stones, the circles are complete and hold the world inside them. Therefore if a master comes to a circle he may sit in the middle and yet see all the world. All the world that matters.”

  A few steps on, he said, “In the circles the ancestors have given us certain messages.”

  And yet a few steps on, he said, “The year also is a circle, and it is here that the circle of the year and the circle of the world may be seen together as one thing.”

  Moloquin said, “I don’t understand.”

  Brant glanced sharply at him. He could not remember that he had ever spoken with Moloquin before; he had heard that the boy’s use of speech was curt and undecorated, but to be addressed by one so young without the honorifics his age alone had earned made the old man a little angry. He pressed his lips together and kept walking. Moloquin kept pace with him. Brant looked up at the sky; he wondered if the setting of the sun would even be visible with this rain.

  “If I cannot see what I must see tonight,” he said, “I shall have to stay the night here.”

  “What must—”

  Moloquin stopped, his eyes lowered, and Brant waited a moment for him to continue but he did not. Brant thought, He has learned not to annoy people. He touched Moloquin’s arm again.

  “I must see the sun set. I will show you where we will stand to watch. If we do not see it set then we must watch tomorrow morning for the sun to rise, and if that too cannot be seen we must stay another day. Are you ready for that?”

  “I will stay until you say we have seen enough,” said Moloquin.

  “Good,” Brant said. “Now, come here, I will tell you what we must do.”

  They went around to the eastern side of the circle, where there stood two more stones, set far apart, just inside the bank, the South and the East Watchers. Brant led the boy to the South Watcher and said, “Here. You must stand here, and look to the horizon, and tell me what you see.”

  Moloquin stood with his back to the stone and looked west, and he said, “I see nothing.”

  “Wait.”

  Brant went back to the East Watcher and stood before it, his back to it, and waited. The rain fell steadily, not hard, but cold and uncomfortable. Brant began to shiver inside his skin coat; he wondered how Moloquin did, wrapped in cloth. Nothing happened for a long while. He began to think it was impossible today, and he would have to spend the night here. With Moloquin to keep him company it would be pleasant to stay away from the village for a while. He had brought food with him, bean cakes, and a little jug of broth. There was nothing around here to build a fire with, but they would keep warm somehow. He remembered once seeing Moloquin asleep under the North Watcher. That would be snug for two people, but warm enough.

  He thought, with a certain grim enjoyment, that this waiting would be a true test of Moloquin; if he did belong to this place, then he would wait a lifetime. Perversely Brant hoped for a colder, harder rain, a longer wait, a true test.

  The crows wheeled and dropped, circling lower and lower over their dinner; the rain suddenly became a deluge, a driving knife-edged downpour that blurred the shapes even of the faltering stones of the central ring. Brant sighed. Shutting his eyes, he let the rain sluice down his face. He was too old to do this. His bones hurt when it rained. He knew that sometime soon he himself would lie in the grass, his body imperfectly shielded from the assaults of the crows and his spirit whirling through the air with the rest of the People, the true People, the Overworld.

  That was to be wished for
, the culmination of life, to be accepted into the true and eternal world, and yet old Brant shrank from it. When he conceived of himself dead, and all the rest of life going on without him, it was such a sense of loss that his mind froze with fear; he could feel nothing but the sickening fear of not-being any more.

  That was weakness. Sternly he told himself that all beings died and that death was the passageway into the real world, but in his mind that passageway was a dark twisting tunnel into nothing, and this world of life and change and sun and wind and tears and laughter was precious beyond any power.

  Suddenly Moloquin cried, “Master!”

  Brant jerked his head up, his eyes open—he thought for an instant he had been dozing, caught deep inside himself like that—and raised his face into the rain. The downpour was lessening. He straightened, turning his eyes to the west, and a low cry broke from his lips.

  There, away to the west, he saw, first, the next stone, with Moloquin beside it; Brant was about to call to him to move in front of the stone again, when Moloquin suddenly turned, grasped the stone, which was nearly head and shoulders taller than he, and scrambled up onto the top of it. Brant choked off his words, his gaze going beyond the stone, beyond the bank whose upper edge coincided with the top of the stone, to the far horizon.

  The storm was breaking. The rain was over. Above the world lay a roof of cloud, grey and heavy like slabs of stone laid from edge to edge of the world, but there in the west now the roof of cloud stood above the world a little, and the sun was falling beneath it. The sun slid down below the cloud slabs, and her lower edge touched the horizon, and her upper edge touched the cloud roof, and her light shone across the world, a blast of horizontal light that blazed across the whole wet world like a purifying ray. The stones glittered with it; the wild whirling crows shone black with it. Brant flung his arms up over his head and shouted for joy.

  Slowly the sun sank down below the edge of the world. Moloquin sprang down from the stone and ran to the old man.

  “What happened? Was it what you came to see?”

  Brant nodded. The sun had set just to the right of the stone, which meant that a few days would see the end of the steady shortening of the days and lengthening of the nights that oppressed everyone during the failing of the year. He sat down on his hams and looked up at Moloquin and smiled.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we have seen the mystery.”

  Moloquin sat down before him. “Will you tell me?”

  Brant shrugged. He could tell the boy nothing he did not know already, it seemed to him. He said, “You know that as the summer wanes, the days grow shorter.”

  Moloquin nodded.

  “From the first the People have known that. All beings know that, birds observe it in their travels, and even mice dig burrows to spend the winter in, when the light begins to fail. For a long while it was believed that the light would fail utterly, save for the actions of the People in calling forth the sun again, but now we know better. The light fails, and as it does, the point of the sunset moves along the edge of the world to the west, day by day. But when it reaches this point—” He nodded to the line of the two stones— “Then the sun turns, and goes back eastward again, and the light comes back again, every day. Not so fast at first.”

  Moloquin said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the old man’s face.

  “And this is the mystery,” Brant said. Although the rain was beginning again, he was relaxed now, relaxed and happy, as after sex. He fingered the dead grass around him. The crows were dropping to the ground near the corpses, and he plucked up a small stone and threw it at them, to no effect: they were used to him now. He faced Moloquin again.

  “This is the mystery, and it is a very plain one, Moloquin. It is that the world is orderly. It does everything in circles. When we know enough, and fit it all together, everything is a circle.”

  Moloquin stared at him a moment; Brant thought, disappointed, He does not see, but then the boy smiled at him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I like that. Yes.”

  Brant grunted at him. “I am overwhelmed that you are pleased, Moloquin. I am sure your opinion even now is the talk of the Overworld.”

  Still he smiled at Moloquin, who had proven himself today, although he probably did not know it. Brant got his feet under him.

  “We shall go back now. I can tell Ladon now that we may have the Midwinter Feasting.”

  Moloquin stood, and the two went back together, going out through the gap in the bank directly opposite them. Brant walked side by side with the boy; in his mind he was sifting through what he had learned today. Moloquin was rough and untutored in the skills of men, but he belonged here, in this place. Brant had despaired of finding a true vessel into which to transfer his own mastery before he went on to the Overworld. Now he had one. Even Moloquin’s strangeness worked for him here: the People expected a Green Bough master to be a little odd. Brant put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. He pretended not to notice the half-smile that Moloquin gave him, the amusement in the boy’s eyes. They went on down to the village.

  The winter wore on, but as Brant had said, every day when the sun rose she lifted her head up a little to the east of where she had risen the day before, and she stayed in the sky a little longer each day. Soon the earth warmed to her caresses. At the equinox, there was a violent storm of snow and sleet and hail, as if the winter were loath to give up his supremacy, but in the days following, the sky was blue and the wind warm, and the women knew it was time to go back to their gardens, to make them ready for the spring planting.

  The men held a great ritual hunt, spending several days away from the village; they took many of the older boys with them, because soon these boys would be chosen into a society and the men wanted to look them over first. Moloquin did not go.

  Steadily the sun climbed higher and higher into the sky, until she blazed forth as queen of Heaven, ruling all but a little corner of the night. Then a runner came from the village to the north, calling all the People to the Great Gathering at the place called Turnings-of-the-Year; and while he was in Ladon’s roundhouse he let go another piece of news—that Mashod, the chief of the largest village to the north, had died during the winter, and his successor had been chosen: his sister’s son, Rulon.

  The People went away to the Great Gathering. From the longhouses the women set forth in disorderly crowds, talking amongst themselves, carrying their babies, their baskets of meal and dried beans and cheese, their strings of dried salmon and smoked salmon and smoked pig. With them, in no special place, walked the headwomen of the People, looking the same as all the others, except for their bright clothes.

  The men went off with great ceremony. They placed Ladon on his chair and bore him three times around the roundhouse, chanting the ritual song, and in long rows, each man in the proper order, they set their masks at their belts, and their drums and lances. Thus, as in everything, the men and women went separately, their paths crossing often, but never travelling together.

  They walked up over the high arch of the downs, and into the hills to the north of them. Here the rolling land suddenly dropped off in steep cliffs down to a marshy stinking lowland, which they called the Dead River, although there was no river there. Away to the west, at the low end of the long narrow valley, was a pond; on top of the blunt hill above it appeared a round embankment with a standing stone, an ancient place, belonging to those who had lived in this place before the People came, which they called the Old Camp.

  Here the valley was narrow, and the People chose this way across to the far side. The old paths, worn into the hillsides, were washed so slick and sheer with the winter storms that they had to make new paths to the top. From there, they had only a little way to go across open ground, following old trails between the slumping hills and sinks and treeless ridges, until they came to the Gathering.

  Moloquin walked along beside Karelia, with Grub just behin
d them, pretending to be by himself. As they approached the Gathering, the sun was going down and the air was dim; the fires of the People spread out across the plain before them like blossoms in the dark. There were so many fires that Moloquin drew closer to Karelia and slipped his hand under her arm, and she looked quickly up at him and smiled.

  Ladon’s was not the only village of the People; here at the sacred place called Turnings-of-the-Year was another, whose chief was Rulon, newly raised to the honor. This lay on a broad flat plain where several springs burst forth, sending many little streams away to the east, to the river. As the day went on more people came, from other villages, and all around Rulon’s village these people laid out their camps under the sky, each staying with those of his own people, so that the hearths spread out in clumps around Rulon’s village in the center.

  Rulon’s was a much smaller village than Ladon’s, having but two longhouses; the roundhouse was tremendous.

  Karelia said, “Once this was the greatest village of the People, but things change.”

  “Where are their gardens?” Moloquin asked.

  She shrugged. “Over there, perhaps.” She waved vaguely to the south. “This village has been here a while; they must have to walk long to reach their work.”

  She led him to the camp where Ladon’s People were making their hearths, and they chose a place to build a fire. Moloquin had been picking up wood as they moved up here from their own village, and he dumped it down in a big heap and went off to find stones for a hearth.

  Karelia sighed, glad to be done walking; her legs ached. She had brought half her home along on her back: mats for sitting and sleeping on, a basket and a pot to cook in, and a jug for water. She put down a mat to sit on and arranged another on a frame of sticks to lean her back against, and pointed to the jug.

  “Grub,” she said, “take that and fetch us some water.”

  The little boy’s mouth fell open. “Me, Ana-Karelia?”